Working a play

Plays answers what exactly should I change? Plays explains what a play is, its kinds, its expected gain and its check; this page is how to work one.

The Plays screen

The lede sums up the top plays, for example “N plays, the top 3 worth an estimated +X pp”, counting only measured gains and saying their basis. Below it, three sections:

• Off the site: get named on a page engines read, get onto a review platform, take part in a community, make the brand unmistakable, correct a fact.
• On your pages: rank for a search engines run, write the missing page, fix a page.
• Foundations: site-wide hygiene, collapsed by default, with counts.

Each row has the title, one sentence on why, the topics, the expected gain with its basis, the effort, the check’s state, the owner and the status. Shipped plays carry their verdict. Filter by status, kind, topic and owner; Board shows the plays by status, and Given to me your own.

Dismissed plays and proposals the evidence no longer supports are left out unless you filter for them.

A play’s page

Why

The evidence: the topics with their standing, the source pages with the brands they name, the searches with where you and the leader rank, what engines say, and the site audit’s findings, each one click from the answers behind it. A play whose gain comes from verdicts shows Plays like this, the record of its kind across sites.

What to do

Nothing is written when you open a play. Write the steps writes numbered steps from the play’s evidence, and the draft’s own button (an outreach note, a reply outline, the markup, the copy) writes one draft for you to edit, both in the language of your market and each in a few seconds. For a play on your site that answers a topic or a search, Write the page writes the whole page instead: it takes a few minutes, uses one of your plan’s pages a month, and gives the page, its title and meta tags, the brief it was written from and the checks it passed. Copy Markdown, Copy HTML and the copy buttons on each tag take it to your site; Write another version writes it again. Write again on steps and drafts is free. Anything the evidence could not confirm (an address, a name, a price, a figure) is an [ADD: …] or a placeholder for you to fill in. You send and publish what you send and publish: Vercatus never contacts anyone or posts anything for you.

Hand off gives the play to the people doing the work:

• Claude Code or Codex: a brief for a coding agent, with the pages, the evidence, the change and how the check will verify it;
• Linear, Jira, GitHub or Asana: an issue, kept on the play, so a second press returns the same issue.

See Linear and Jira. Hand-offs come with Growth and the plans above it.

Shipped?

The acceptance check: what it looks for, its state (not run, failing, passing, error), its history, and Run the check now. For a page play you can name the page the check should read, if it is not one the check would find in your sitemap. The first passing check marks the play Shipped, with the date.

Result

Once shipped, every read of the verdict on a small timeline (day 14, 30 and 45), what was treated and what was left alone, the checks that should stay flat, what else changed in the window, and the verdict’s sentence. See Verdicts.

Activity

Every change of status, owner and due date, every check, hand-off, set of steps, draft and page, with who did it: a person, the check or Vercatus.

Status, owner and due date

Set them inline on the play’s page or on a row. A person sets Proposed, Planned, In progress or Dismissed (with a reason); Shipped comes only from a passing check, and Measuring from Vercatus once the verdict window opens. The owner must be a member of the workspace. Analysts, admins and owners change plays; viewers read them. Every change is in the audit log.

A play on a topic held out by an experiment is labelled held and cannot be planned or started until the experiment ends.

Regenerating

Plays are regenerated every day after the lenses update. Regenerate plays does it now. A regeneration updates each play’s evidence, gain and rank, marks plays whose evidence is gone as stale, brings back ones whose evidence returned, and never changes a status a person set.

Where else plays show

• Overview: the next three plays.
• Home: the top plays across sites.
• A topic’s page: plays for this topic.
• A competitor’s page: plays to close this gap.
• Sources: each gap links to its play, and the forums and communities engines cite are measured there.